What Is Pony Express?
This is! Letters on fashion, personal essays, things that make my mom say “you have to write that down” (Specifically she’s obsessed with the story of this one time I dated a birder). Twice monthly, god willing, and always written with care.
Why Is It Pony Express?
It’s 1860 (sorry). Post gold-rush. Half a million people had moved out to California, but the railroads stopped at the Mississippi. It took more than a month for any news to reach the coast. Los Angeles found out they’d been admitted to the Union six weeks after the fact.
The solution? Four hundred ponies, eighty riders, and $1 per half-ounce of anything you wanted to send (that’s over $70 for a letter). For eighteen glorious months, the fastest way to get a message across 2,000 miles of fly-over states was to have it carried only pony-back by little men named things like “Pony Bob” and “Buffalo Bill.” They called it the Pony Express!
The route was drawn through the desert and over the Sierra Nevadas. The riders weathered blizzards and war. Pony Bob once rode 380 miles non-stop in what would be the fastest delivery ever made by the Pony Express. He was carrying Lincoln’s inaugural address.
Letters with this level of import were typical to the operation. Because of course they were. If sending a note cost as much as a steak dinner and getting it to Missouri meant risking the lives of twenty-odd men and just as many ponies, you’d make sure whatever you’d written was worth it, wouldn’t you?
Meanwhile, I am saying shit literally all the time. I am texting you while I am DMing you. I am posting to the grid and I am reposting that content in a Substack note. I am talking your ear off if you’re close enough to hear. I am on Discord, I am in the comments. It is a miracle that I am not yet on goodreads but that day is still young!
I have so many opportunities to spew whatever I am thinking at any given moment, because the platforms through which I might spew them are oriented for exactly that — compulsive, constant expression of “oh and ANOTHER thing!” Almost nothing is crafted with forethought. Definitely nothing is worth a steak dinner.
But not here. Here is different. In the sacred nook that is my newsletter, I share only what I’ve composed with careful intention. The things I send here have marinated, ruminated, deliberated for weeks before I call them final. This is my Pony Express, with letters, if certainly not worth dying for, at least, I hope, worth reading.
Who’s Behind Pony Express?
My name is Kate Snyder. I’m twenty-something and living in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, working in fashion and playing in everything else.
